Mencyclopaedia: Toast

Hot threads for thinking women's crumpet.

BY Luke Leitch |
31 August 2012

Greatcoat, £425, blazer, £225, jeans £119, cravat, £9.50

Co-founder James Seaton

Around 195,000 British women regularly melt over Toast. This 15-year-old, Swansea-based catalogue retailer (lately online and bricks-and-mortar, too) has built a significant business by creating a potently feminine fantasyland - and then selling the accoutrements needed to make that fantasy real. Anatolian-striped bath towels, mango-wood bread boards, beeswax candles and a large selection of terribly tasteful womenswear are all shot so artfully in Toast's catalogues - inevitably inhabited by whey-faced, plait-coiffed beauties staring balefully into a washed-out, rustic middle distance - that after just once glimpse its predominantly female customer base leaps for the phone to place multiple orders.

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Men's clothes, though, have been a bit of an afterthought for Toast. Its first collection was launched two years ago, at the particular behest of co-founder Jamie Seaton. After years designing the womenswear (his wife, Jessica, oversees those catnip catalogues and business matters), Seaton had a yen to make something for himself. The results are as tasteful and clean-cut as the rest of his designs, and the catalogues that showcase them equally as seductive. Vitally, it is not only men who should relish Seaton's fondness for well-cut corduroy, tweed and British melton - they are, I suspect, stimulating for Toast's core clientele, too.

Boots, £295; penknife, £19; shirt, £85

Take this tousle-fringed, strong-jawed chap standing sentinel in the St Ives sawgrass, pictured here. He is wearing a £425 made-in-England, twill-lined greatcoat, a £119 pair of straight-leg jeans, a £225 four-button cavalry twill blazer and - a telling touch - a £9.50 teal "kerchief" tied raffishly cravat-like inside his collar. Furthermore, of course, he is wearing Toast's-trademark middle-distance stare. Mellors meets Monty Don, he is perfectly cooked-up Toast crumpet: a contemporary English middle-class women's fantasy man (Ian McEwan does Mr Darcy) to match the fantasy breadboard and fantasy tunic-dresses. Toast menswear, in short, is a must-browse destination for British men who desire clothes that British women will fancy them in.

"My aim," says Seaton, "is to design clothes that are rooted in tradition but that work well for modern times - so we use a lot of authentic British fabrics and tweak traditional cuts to bring them up to date." This season's three-piece Harris tweed suit (£675) and wool-lined, waterproof cotton coastal parka (£285) are both excellent examples of this.

He also has a great eye for non-Toast classics that are then incorporated into the catalogues and shops. The long-neglected "Veldtschoen" waterproof shoe construction method - once a Northampton staple - features this autumn via an every-man-should-own-them zug-grain boot (£295) by Joseph Cheaney, and there is an oddly compelling £19 Japanese penknife, too. On occasion, it's true, Toast can be just a smidgen overdone - Tony Parsons seen in a top-price seat at Arsenal whilst wearing a flat-cap shows that the combination of metropolitan middle-class affluence and professed salt-of-the-earthiness does not always quite work. That, though, is a minor quibble: if you want compliments, try Toast.